At 10:41 AM 1/16/2010, Kathy Dopp wrote:
To count IRV by sorting piles of ballots requires far fewer piles than 9 but also to do decentralized as you suggest would require everyone in the entire country in all precincts sitting around waiting for all the late-counted ballots to be ready and waiting for the total results to be tabulated centrally somewhere so they could sort the ballots for the next round - totally undoable practically.
No, it's doable. Quite doable. That's what they do in Australia. Each counting group reports its results to the central tabulation office, by phone, at least it used to be. Then the central office, when it has received all of these (or perhaps enough of them to be confident), and only if a majority has not been found, transmits the results back to the counting group, and it does its elimination(s) and then reports the next tallies.
How many rounds does it take? And how long is taken for each round? Each time there is an elimination, a pile is eliminated, and if they do it right, which I'd guess they do, they will keep the new ballot separate for a little while, so each "pile" is really two or more piles, laid out so that one can tell in which round the new votes came in. And if there is an error, they then don't have to resort the whole bloody mess. Or they could insert a marker paper, so that the latest additions are on top and the separation easily found.
Meanwhile, they aren't twiddling their thumbs. They might recount and recheck each pile, looking for sorting or summing errors.
It can work, Kathy. How well is another story. If IRV were really a better method than, say, top two runoff, or a single-ballot summable method, it m might be worth it.
Of course the number of tallies to make IRV/STV precinct-summable grows exponentially as the number of candidates grows and is equal to more than the total number of voters who vote in each precinct most of the time with a larger number of candidates.
STV has other benefits that could make it worthwhile. I believe there are better methods yet, that would be precinct summable, so it could be moot, but there is an argument for the vote transfers in STV that doesn't apply to single-winner.
> each state, each little government would be responsible to confirm their > precinct totals on the map and everybody gets to look at it. what's > particularly insecure about that? I don't think you yet understand the counting process for IRV/STV. Why not create a set of 200 ballots for one precinct with a mixture of all 15 unique ballot combinations on them for three candidates and try counting them so you can fully understand the process.
Cruel. ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
